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Carwood Lipton knew there would never be enough time and distance to stop him from waking in a cold sweat absolutely convinced he was still outside of Foy, stuck behind a hay stack with mortars and machine gun fire all around him, because Dike froze up. Eventually he could convince himself he was safe. He was home. His wife was sleeping in the bed next to him. And when all else failed he could be bitterly grateful it wasn’t the same dream every night.
*
He dreamt of the days leading up to the taking of Foy, of men in pieces in the snow and of craters once foxholes with no pieces of men to find. Mostly though, the trees were exploding, the men were shouting, and the mortar that hit the half dug foxhole he and Luz were in wasn’t a dud. The sensation of his heart still rapidly beating tended to wake him.
*
He didn’t dream of Cartean often, although he would jerk awake occasionally when the shrapnel in the dream hit him a little higher than it actually did. He always hesitated to lift the blanket and make sure.
*
Other nights he was back in the Ardennes, there were no explosions, only cold: in the air, in his lungs, in the dirt beneath him, and leaking through his too thin gear. He could hear the other men: Babe’s off tempo singing, Luz’s laugh mixing with Skip’s, Guarnere’s grumbling, but it was all too far away, and he was alone. He wanted to get up, to stomp some warmth back into his muscles, but the cold iced his bones, and froze his blood and he couldn’t get up. He thought he heard the soft cadence of Doc Roe’s accented voice, but it couldn’t penetrate through the cold and the sinking dark. He couldn’t wake from those dreams and would crawl out of bed in the morning trembling with a phantom cold he couldn’t shake until his first cup of coffee.
*
He only dreamt of his chute failing to open once. There was an unusual rush of hurricane wind roaring in his ears over the sound of guns and planes exploding, and then the ground came into startling clarity through the dark. He started awake hard enough to fall out of bed.
*
There was one particularly vivid dream where there was no shouting or explosions. Actually, there were birds singing. It was warm and sunny and he marched with the other NCOs and lined up along an anonymous piece of stone-built wall. Guarnere stood next to him smoking a cigarette, and Grant fidgeted on his other side. Someone up the line coughed, maybe Martin. The rifles of the men silently lining up in front of them clunk dully; the mid day sun gleamed on the unblemished gun metal. He didn’t see the face of his executioner, but he saw the bullet leave the barrel of the rifle, saw it all the way until he could see no more and woke up smelling nicotine and gun power.
*
When he dreamt of Haguenau, it often started on the couch. The damned ratty couch in the bombed out shell of house that smelled of his grandmother if she’d given up knitting and taken to cleaning guns. The blanket Luz gave him made it stifling, but he couldn’t stop shaking. The shaking reminded him how much his lungs ached and just thinking about it started the coughing. They began as dry and rasping gasps, but soon they’d turned into horrible wet things that scraped up from the bottom of his lungs to be hacked out in blood and tissue onto the blanket. He couldn’t stop. Outside bombs rained down from across the river while everything inside of him just kept shuddering up in an unending parade until he couldn’t breathe and would wake up to find himself wheezing and coughing. He would get up and walk the halls until his lungs stopped trying to expel the fluid that wasn’t there.
….There was an alternative to that nightmare.
He was still in Haguenau, but not on the couch. The bombardment was quiet and he was in the bed Lieutenant Speirs insisted he take while sick. He started coughing, but a warm weight settled on the bed next to him. The small ancient mattress sagged and Lipton slid into the dip until he was pressed against the taut muscles of a thigh. A large pleasantly cool hand settled on his back between his shoulder blades. It rubbed in small soothing circles with its fingers spread wide. He didn’t die choking in his own lungs that night and woke looking for someone else in the bed. He tried not to feel disappointed when he found his wife, with her capable, but small hands, sleeping next to him. He wondered which version of the dream was the kinder.
*
He always seemed to end up back at Foy though. Sometimes it was stuck with Dike. Sometimes it was in the town. Sometimes he died. Sometimes he lived, but Luz got shot, the radio and his head exploding. Sometimes it was Folley, hit in the neck and Lipton could see the arterial spray from across the field. One night, even back out of the action where he should be safe, Winters got taken down by a sniper. The worst dreams though, Lipton had come to admit, weren’t when Dike wasn’t relieved of command. No, the worst dreams by far were when Speirs came and did.
Lipton’s nightmares killed him hundreds of times, but they killed Ronald Speirs thousands.
*
Machine gun fire mowed Speirs down just before he reached Dike to relieve him. He fell in a heap and Lipton was still stuck behind the haystack staring at the pieces, just as frozen in place as Dike.
*
The Germans reacted faster when Speirs made his run through their line; he took a bullet in the shoulder, and kept running, unfazed. They shot him again, in the chest; he staggered, but wouldn’t stop until a final round hit him in the head. His body managed another juddering mimicry of a step before it fell and Speirs went still.
*
Other times Speirs made the first charge unscathed only to be stabbed with a German bayonet from behind. His eyes unerringly found Lipton before he turned and shot his attacker as he died.
*
A few times Lipton was standing next to him after supposedly securing Foy and instead of the boys the sniper took out, it was Speirs. One minute he was issuing orders, the next Lipton was staring at the empty space he used to occupy.
*
The worst took place in the church in ReChamps. The choir sang sweetly in the background while Speirs smiled at him. Lipton actually felt warm for what seemed like the first time in an eternity, and then there was the pop of a rifle, and something wet hit Lipton’s face.
Lipton struggled to wake and when he did his face was still wet, but the dampness on his cheeks wasn’t blood, or sweat.
*
There weren’t always nightmares. He wasn’t haunted only by the possibilities and the horrible certainties of the war. Some nights the kindness of his mind hurt as much.
*
There was a time he thought he dreamt of Haguenau almost as much as Foy. Dreams where he wasn’t sick, but Spiers let him have the bed any way. He shivered from a completely different kind of fever, the hands on him weren’t checking for a temperature, and after the bed felt too warm and too small for two but they crowded together on it anyway.
*
He dreamt of Eagles Nest and Hitler’s liquor. Nixon, Winters, and Welsh sat in the clear sun on lounge chairs. Winters wasn’t drinking, not even in Lipton’s dreams, but he smiled while Nixon and Welsh indulged. Lipton watched them from the shade. He could feel someone next to him, watching him, but he could only stare ahead as Nixon took a long drink, his too white hands wrapped around the green glass. Lipton didn’t even realize he was holding a bottle himself until another bottle rang against it.
Then he could turn his head, could see Speirs and Speirs’ smile soft and easy and so very unreal it had to be a dream. Lipton was happy to just look at him, to look at him and have there be no mortar rounds or snipers, to have Speirs be alive and whole and drinking looted champagne, but Speirs put down the bottle on the ground and leaned forward. Lipton started to lean back but Speirs caught him around the back of his head and pulled him in. His kiss was sloppier than Lipton would have thought of him, wet and messy but still with the intensity and determination that was Ronald Speirs. Quickly Lipton pulled away, turned to where Winters and the others sat. They weren’t talking and laughing and instead were staring at him. Lipton could hear birds out on the mountain side and Speirs still had his hand tangled in Lipton’s hair, his thumb stroked up and down without any sense of urgency.
Nixon laughed suddenly and lifted his bottle into the air, the expensive liquor inside sloshed over the lip onto the ground and the sleeve of his uniform. Welsh joined in his laughter and nearly shattered his bottle tapping it against Nixon’s. They broke into rancorous off-key song. Winters sat quietly and smiled.
*
Lipton woke every morning torn between the wish for a dreamless night, and a desperate longing to wake up again, in another time, in another place, as someone he used to think he could be. He would stay in bed a few moments longer than he should, and let himself believe it could have gone another way. Then he would get up, and face the day firm with the knowledge it went the only way it could, that he’d done his best.
Most mornings he believed that.
*
There was one more dream, Lipton thought it might be Austria, but it could be anywhere with a warm cloudless blue sky that stretched on into fields a shade of green that could only exist in a dream. All of Easy Company was there, all of them, even the ones whose deaths weren’t just horrible nightmares. Some of them weren’t even Easy, some were Dog, some were Able, the kid who followed Winters on the gun-charge D-Day. Guys whose faces he remembered, but names he didn’t. Everyone looked young again.
Everyone was whole again.
He met the eyes of men he’d known for half a lifetime and they felt like strangers with eyes clear and unburdened, but they embraced him all the same. He shook hands and slapped shoulders and just kept going down the line until only one man was left.
Ron looked exactly as Carwood always remembered him. He embraced Carwood and everything felt as right and settled as he always knew it would. Carwood didn’t try to pull away.
He knew it was a dream, even if he couldn’t remember falling asleep…but it was a good dream.
He stayed there surrounded by men he knew, men he trusted, and an overwhelming feeling of safe, safe safe, breathing the smell of flowers on the soft breeze, until the sun went down behind the hills.
It really was a good dream.